The word EVIL - brandished so often by
George W.Bush and
just as regularly scorned by those who oppose him - could use some
serious
parsing.

It is possible that neither side in the
debate about evil
quite knows what it is talking about. Philosophically and
theologically, both
are fighting the last war. They are talking about a world that no
longer
exists, or rather, they fail to see what evil lies in the world that
now
exists.

President Bush uses the word in an
in-your-face,
born-again manner that takes its resonance from a long Judeo-Christian
tradition that sees radical evil embodied in heroically diabolical
figures.
This personalized evil is the kind that is insinuated by the sauntering
Tempter
in the first scene of the Book of Job, when God and Satan speculate
like racing
touts about whether Job can go a mile and a quarter on a muddy
track. In
Bush's usage, evil has the perverse prestige of Miltonís defiant
Lucifer. Evil
emanates, implicitly, from a devilish intelligence with horns and a
tail, an
absolutely malevolent personality, God's rival in the cosmos, condemned
to lose
the fight (eventually) but powerful in the world.

Bush's critics, hearing the word, go
ironic. They put
evil in quotes and think of Dana Carvey's Church Lady: "Well, isn't
that
special, Saddam? Who's your little friend? Could it be
Satan!!!???"
They mock Bush for what they see as a primitive, frightening and
atavistic use
of a medieval term that should probably be banished from civilized
discourse in
a multicultural world.

Evil, these critics say, is in any case
such an elusive
term that it can only cause mischief in human affairs and has a way of
evaporating - or turning into something else as time passes.
Toward the end of
World War I, when labor unions threatened strikes in England, Minister
of
Munitions Winston Churchill sternly blamed "evil and subterranean
influences," meaning, he said, "pacifism, defeatism and
Bolshevism." Of course, the real evils of World War I, which
slaughtered
an entire generation of Europe's young men, were obdurate military
stupidity,
the effectiveness of newly industrialized war and a monstrous official
indifference to the value of human life. (A neglected dimension
of evil, by
the way, is stupidity.)

But even if it's elusive and even if the
term is used
brainlessly, evil is still there - a mystery, a black hole into which
reason
and sunshine vanish but nonetheless ... there. Talk to the
children with
chopped-off hands in Sierra Leone. It is as fatuous to deny the
existence of
evil as it is to toss the word around irresponsibly. The children
of the
Enlightenment sometimes have an inadequate understanding of the
possibilities of
the Endarkenment. The question is how evil exists, how it works.

Go back 40 years to the controversy that
surrounded
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, a study of the Adolf Eichmann
trial, in
which she coined the famous phrase "the banality of evil." Arendt
did not seem satisfied with the term and afterward wrote in a letter to
a
friend (the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem), "It is
indeed my opinion now that evil is never Ďradical,í that it is only
extreme,
and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It
can overgrow
and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a
fungus on the
surface." This was what W H. Auden meant: "Evil is unspectacular
and
always human,/ And shares our bed and eats at our own table." The
normality of evil.

The truth about evil that needs attention
now is its
shallow, deadly, fungus quality. Nice people - especially in a
tiny,
multicultural world in which different civilizations inhabit different
centuries - are often moved to evil deeds, like blowing up the
Other. Don't
bother demonizing people as being inherently evil (as Satan is
evil). That's
not how it works. Opportunistic evil passes like an electric
current through
the world and through people, or wanders like an infection that takes
up
residence in individuals or cultures from time to time.

Distance once
helped dampen the effects of human
wickedness, and weapons once had limited range. But evil has burst into
a new
dimension. The globalization, democratization and miniaturization
of the
instruments of destruction (nuclear weapons or their diabolical
chemical-biological stepbrothers) mean a quantum leap in the delivery
systems
of evil. This levels the playing field and the level field has
fungus on it.
Every tinhorn with a chemistry set becomes a potential world-historical
force
with more discretionary destructive power at hand than the great old
monsters,
from Caligula to Stalin, ever had. In the new dimension,
microevil (the dark
impulse to rape or murder, say) and macro-evil (the urge to genocide)
achieve
an ominous reunion in any bid for the apocalyptic gesture. That's
the real
evil that is going around. [TIME,
FEBRUARY 24, 2003]